Children Conceptualizing Their Capabilities: Results of the Survey During the First Children's World Congress on Child Labour

This paper reports the results of a research project which allowed children as the basis of a bottom-up strategy for understanding the relevant dimensions of children’s well-being. The subjects of this research were children participating in the "Children's World Congress on Child Labour" held in Florence in May 2004 and organized by the Global March Against Child Labour and other associations. Children were invited to interact and express their opinions on the most relevant issues related to their childhood and adolescence. The paper has three main aims. The first is to propose and legitimate theoretically a view which considers children, not simply as recipients of freedoms, but also as participants in the process of delineating a set of core capabilities. The second is to propose a methodological approach to the conceptualization of a list of relevant capabilities. The third is to identify a tentative list of relevant capabilities for children through a participatory bottom-up approach. One of the key findings of the research is that, among the capabilities conceptualized, education, love and care are primary in terms of relevance.